Visible City (4 page)

“Can you say hi?” the mothers prompted, and one of the kids garbled an answer.

Claudia smiled, then turned back to her work. But she couldn’t dispense with the kids so easily. They began screaming for no apparent reason, running as if they were at the playground. Claudia felt sympathy for the mothers, but they were untroubled by their children’s behavior. These mothers saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing as their children raced to the rear of the café, spewing crumbs, then back to the table where they shoved cupcakes into their mouths. They made no distinction between the café and their living rooms, between the worlds of children and adults. She and Leon might have allowed Emma a freedom that would have been incomprehensible to her own mother, but even so, they would never have permitted such public misbehavior, sanctioned by these mothers who let their kids know,
Your every wish is my command.
It was hard to believe this was the child-centered philosophy that she and Leon had once embraced.

“Excuse me, but this isn’t a playground,” Claudia finally said.

She glanced at those sitting nearby, hoping they would smile approvingly at her willingness to take a stand, but no one met her eye. She had intended to be only mildly rebuking, but apparently she had sounded far harsher. She blushed and felt the same shame as earlier, when she had been caught screaming from her window.

“It’s not a library either,” said one of the mothers. Though they continued to shoot Claudia annoyed looks, they made grudging efforts to control their kids.

“Use your words. Use your inside voices,” the mothers instructed.

“But when do we get to use our outside voices?” one of the kids asked.

Finally, the mothers began to pack up, discussing in loud, narrating voices that their next stop was Gymboree. The children attached themselves to the pastry case, sucking their lips against the glass like catfish in a tank. It had been restocked with fresh cupcakes, and though the children pleaded for more, the mothers said no; they’d exceeded their daily allotment of refined sugar and artificial color. Though they were so intent on fulfilling their kids’ every need, certain limits were apparently established and enforced. But where in their hierarchies of all things bad for their children did an extra cupcake fall? These young mothers had so many rules for their kids and yet none at all.

“Was everything okay?” asked the lavender-haired young woman behind the counter when, an hour later, Claudia returned her teacup and saucer. The girl’s hair matched the icing on the cupcakes, which suddenly looked irresistible, like rare gemstones or ancient artifacts you could not only touch but consume.

“The tea was great but am I the only one bothered by the noise?” Claudia asked.

“No one can stand it. The other day I tripped over a stroller and everything went flying,” said the purple-haired woman. “Why can’t these moms keep their kids home until they’re old enough to behave?”

“That would be a long time. But maybe they can use their so-called inside voices in the meantime,” Claudia said.

Looking at her teacup, Claudia noticed for the first time that the same cabbage rose pattern had decorated a tea set in her mother’s house. It was one of the few things in which her mother had taken pleasure, along with a collection of antique glass bottles that she’d lined up by her bedside window where she spent much of her day, entranced by the flicker of light against the blue and green glass.

If Claudia’s father, an economics professor at a small college near North Easton, Massachusetts, hadn’t died so young, if her mother’s life hadn’t been permeated by the feeling that she wasn’t given enough, perhaps she would have been less embittered. With a precision that was remarkable, her mother had always known how to make Claudia feel bad. In displeasure, or maybe just bafflement, her mother regularly proclaimed her signature “I don’t understand you.” She certainly didn’t understand Claudia’s decision to go to graduate school in art history, a subject she considered a waste of time. She had no interest in hearing Claudia’s descriptions of the works of art that had captivated her, some of which were a few blocks from their house. As a teenager, Claudia often walked past Unity Church, and one day she’d noticed the open door and taken in the two majestic stained-glass windows inside. With the afternoon light streaming through, setting every color on fire, the world was no longer as small and confining.

Any attempt to explain this to her mother was met with condemnation. Nor could her mother understand a daughter who was unwilling to put aside her ambitions when she, her mother, became increasingly sick. Claudia had moved to Boston to start graduate school, going home on weekends, then less frequently when her every visit was met with a barrage of recrimination. Even now, so many years later, Claudia avoided returning to her hometown. Once she met Leon, the estrangement from her mother hadn’t mattered as much. With Leon, she thought she could create her family anew.

Three years later, when her mother died, she was already pregnant with Emma. She sold off what little there was but took the glass bottles, because she wanted to remember how, when the light shone through them, a smile had escaped her mother’s pursed lips. Despite the ever-present disapproval, Claudia had always thought of her mother’s love for beautiful things as an impetus for her own work.

As she held the teacup in her hand, Claudia felt her mother’s presence anew. She had spent her whole life trying not to be like her. But now she recognized a surprising new version of herself, one who spoke the darker parts of her own mind, and she felt a fledgling rustle of understanding.

After a month with little sleep, Jeremy’s body refused to comply. His hands shook from too much coffee. His skin had a gray, sickly pallor. He paced the length of his office, then sat back at his desk. But it was no use. Pen in hand, Jeremy dozed, his dreams and documents spliced together. He awoke, placed numbered tabs on each exhibit and schedule, then fell asleep for so long that the motion sensor lights in his office switched off. In the dark, he awoke, clicked Print on his computer, briefly fell asleep, then hit Print again. Only when he saw the multiple copies waiting at the printer did he realize what he’d done. On the way back to his office, he moved slowly, worried he might fall over. If he did, the other lawyers would simply step over him. Someone would call maintenance to move him out of the way.

He was a fifth-year associate in the real estate department of a Manhattan law firm, and for over a year he had been working on the acquisition of two Upper West Side apartment buildings. The first building, deep into the construction phase, was across the street from his own apartment, though he was never home to witness its progress. The second building had suffered a series of delays, but after months spent doing due diligence in a windowless conference room surrounded by mountains of documents, he’d just finalized the purchase and sale agreement.

Jeremy fell asleep again, and this time he startled awake to the sound of the phone ringing, unsure whether a minute had passed or a month. When Richard’s extension appeared on the phone display, Jeremy jumped. As a second-year associate, Jeremy had been assigned to work for Richard. Plucked from the ranks of junior associates who would inevitably be thinned out due to attrition or exhaustion, Jeremy believed the assurances that the long hours would yield their reward. Richard had promised to look out for him, shielding him from other partners intent on giving him new assignments when he was already swamped. Once, he clasped him on the shoulder and said that in Jeremy’s dedication he saw a younger version of himself.

Two minutes later, Jeremy was sitting in Richard’s office. At his desk, Richard was wearing a khaki field vest over his dress shirt, the same thing he’d worn earlier to a meeting with the client. Even in this era of business casual, it was odd, but Richard could show up in a matching safari hat and Jeremy wouldn’t say a word. He wouldn’t dare breach the wall between their work and their lives, even though he spent more nights with Richard than he did with his wife; he’d sat so often in his office during conference calls that he could mimic Richard’s every facial expression: the half smile when he was willing to negotiate, the twitch in his cheek when they’d arrived at an impasse. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d started to look like him as well.

Jeremy waited for him to say that he’d done a good job, but praise was in short supply. Richard demanded a document that Jeremy knew nothing about, and he stared in disbelief when Jeremy said so.

“Do you have any idea how much money is on the line? Do you know how impatient the client is?” Richard asked.

Richard had been acting strangely since hearing murmurings of neighborhood opposition to the second building, but Jeremy didn’t expect to see him so rattled.

“I don’t think you want to imagine the response when I tell the client that my associate fucked this up. Every delay costs them a few hundred thousand dollars a day,” Richard fumed.

Jeremy stammered an explanation, hating how plaintive he sounded. Getting ahead was the same as trying to stay afloat. If he didn’t work these hours, someone else gladly would. He and Nina had spent all their money on an apartment they couldn’t afford, mortgaging themselves to his future earnings. They had long ago believed in an egalitarian marriage, though recently he’d overheard Nina say, only half joking, that they’d ended up with the kind of egalitarianism in which she did everything. “Don’t undo anything,” Nina warned him whenever she was rushing to get the kids out of the apartment, afraid that if she left him with the kids for a moment, time would move backward; the breakfast would come uncooked, the shoes off, the pajamas back on.

But that was only for now. In another year or two, Jeremy would be up for partner. If they could make it through these years, their lives would once again match their aspirations. Making partner, they had come to believe, was the portal to the rest of their lives—even if he was too tired to remember what they wanted that future to look like. He promised Richard he would correct the situation and left his office in shame. On the way back to his own office, Jeremy heard the tapping of other keyboards but didn’t stop to say hello to any of his fellow associates. They’d all been yelled at by unhappy partners, but he preferred to bear the humiliation alone.

In his office, Jeremy stood at the window and gazed at the thicket of buildings, a view that had once bestowed a sense of grandeur upon his work. “Look at them,” Richard had said when they first started working together and Jeremy had found him staring out a conference room window. “All these buildings are here because of people like you and me.” It was the kind of thing his father might have said; sometimes he imagined those words extolling this profession had actually come from his father, that it was he who looked over the documents Jeremy drafted and nodded with pride.

Six years ago, his father had suffered a ruptured aneurism while at work. How terribly fitting, it had seemed to him then and now, that his father who had lived at work had died there too. At the time, Jeremy had been in his last year of law school. “You can do anything you want, after law school,” his father used to joke, but of course it wasn’t a joke. In his family, there was only one way. His father too had started off as an associate in a law firm whose offices Jeremy could see from a conference room window. When he hadn’t made partner, they’d moved to Chicago where Jeremy’s mother had grown up and where his father joined a small firm. Though his father acted as though the move had been his choice, Jeremy had always heard the disappointment at the path his career had taken.

Before law school, Jeremy had struggled to find things to talk to his father about; no matter how hard he tried, he felt a gaping distance. But when he’d gotten into NYU law school, his father’s alma mater, he’d basked in the approval and hoped this would make up for all the other ways he was becoming less the person his father wanted. But when it came to his father, there had been endless ways to disappoint.

Jeremy’s e-mail beeped, an angry missive from Richard. “I’m waiting,” the subject read, followed by a message bearing only a single question mark. Servitude came easily to him, but a part of him wanted to hit Reply and fill the page with a barrage of question marks. Even in a state of exhaustion, he was usually able to put aside the question of why he was working so hard. No matter how late, he still felt the craving to be like the partners he’d envied since he was a summer associate, with their swaggering, expectant ways.

But tonight he was so tired that his eyes burned in their sockets. The room spun if he stood up too quickly. He couldn’t free himself from the imprisonment of the day. That morning, descending into the subway, his eyes had darted, as they always did, to the people nearby, none of whom were looking anxiously around. Was he the only one who still worried about being stranded too far above ground or trapped too far below? So many years later, Jeremy still felt a quiet swell of panic upon entering his office in the Citicorp building. Its sloped peak was the tallest in its immediate vicinity, and as planes flew up the East River, visible from his window, he worried that his fear would guide them like a light stick toward his building. As a child beset with a nightly assortment of fears, he’d made bargains with God, trading obedience for protection. He had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, and though he no longer was observant, a part of him still believed that he could bargain his way to safety. One night, he’d lain awake in fear, and his father came into his room, sat beside him, and took out a prayer book. The words his father pointed to were ones he knew well:
The Lord is my light, whom shall I fear.
He’d said the psalm, but what really comforted him was his father next to him, and the wish that he would stay there the whole night through.